Former vice president Joe Biden's allies say neither detractors in the media, nor his rivals on the stump, understand the root of his appeal
The first thing you notice at a Joe Biden event is the age: Many of the reporters covering him are really young. Biden is not. The press corps, or so the Biden campaign sees it, is culturally liberal and highly attuned to modern issues around race and gender and social justice. Biden is not. The reporters are Extremely Online. Biden couldn’t tell you what TikTok is.
By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. How Democrats see such episodes is at the heart of the Democratic primary. One side views these sorts of typical Biden campaign-trail moments as evidence of a politician well past his prime — casually sexist in a way that might have gone unremarked in, say, 1973 when he first joined the Senate. His supporters see them as good examples of why he’s the lovable Democrat best-suited to beat Trump.
To Biden’s advisers and allies, the gap between a press corps, as well as the wider online political class, that is largely in its twenties and thirties and a candidate who would be 78 at his Inaugural explains a lot about why the pundits and Twitter activists are so confounded by the former vice president’s resilience.
The well-known Democrat said of the Biden press corps, “They view this party as dominated by woke millennials and through the lens of coastal issues. They are products, increasingly, of fairly elite schools and they don’t talk to a lot of voters who don’t look and talk like them except their parents, who also tend to be similar to them. Occasionally they are shocked to learn they have relatives who voted for Donald Trump.
On stage before the party delegates, several candidates began to make a more robust case against Biden. Elizabeth Warren owned the room, and the day, with an electric performance that also showcased her campaign’s ability to organize.
“This gets back to the vitriol of the left,” said the prominent Democrat. “They seem to feel like, ‘Why don’t you dumb voters see what we see? If we yell at you enough will you start to listen to us?’”“The party is older than people think. It’s more centrist than people think,” said the senior Biden adviser. He noted that Biden’s favorability rating among Democrats has been in the mid 70s since the start of this race.
Like others, Bennet argued that the polls were misleading and would get more volatile as voters focused more closely on the race. “If history is any guide, the people that are leading today are not going to be the people that win in Iowa and win in New Hampshire,” he insisted, adding with self-deprecation: “And I'm prepared to let history be our guide since I'm at 1 percent today.”
Swalwell told me he was wrong that this was the right moment for that message and doubted that a candidate like Buttigieg would be any more successful than he was. “I felt like I was in a bad traffic jam with no offramp and no way to get ahead,” he said in an interview about his short-lived campaign. “And certainly the lead car was the vice president. I don’t know if this is a generational election because of who the president is.
In the afternoon, the issue of Biden’s age and mental acuity suddenly burst open in the airless media room where most of the candidates, though not Biden, spoke with reporters after their speeches. I asked Rep. Tim Ryan, who the previous day had been quoted saying that Biden was “declining,” whether he meant declining in the polls or mentally declining and he made it clear he meant the latter. Pressed further by reporters, he would only say “there’s a lack of clarity” when Biden speaks.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Biden 'misspoke' on opposing the Iraq War 'immediately': Biden adviserFormer Vice Pres. Joe Biden “misspoke” when he said he “immediately” opposed the Iraq war after the invasion began, a senior campaign adviser says.
Read more »
AAPI voters favor Biden, Sanders and Warren, according to new pollAndrew Yang leads the second tier of preferred candidates, polling eight percentage points below Biden, Warren and Sanders.
Read more »
Warren Gains on Biden in Perceived Electability in CBS Poll(Bloomberg) -- Elizabeth Warren is gaining both in probable Democratic convention delegates and in perceived electability, a CBS News/YouGov tracker poll showed on Sunday, even as former Vice President Joe Biden leads in an estimate of likely delegates from early-voting states.Among those considering
Read more »
Opinion: There's a reason populists like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are gaining on Joe BidenOpinion: There's a reason populists like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are gaining on Joe Biden (via latimesopinion)
Read more »
Latest 2020 polls show Elizabeth Warren gaining ground on Joe BidenA Monmouth University poll released in late August showed a virtual three-way tie nationally among Biden, Warren and Sanders.
Read more »